Thursday, June 09, 2011

There seems to be a problem here. If I personally have no reasons not to lie, and doing so would overall benefit me, there can be no possible reason why I should not lie. (Suppose I am unbothered by the negative consequences that others would inflict on me for lying.) This results in an absurd situation in which it is "reasonable" for me to lie, while it is also reasonable for others to try to prevent me from lying.

I do not see this as an absurd situation. In fact, I think it is quite common.

Lying would still be counted as immoral in this case. It is still true that people generally have many and strong reasons to promote an aversion to lying. The person who lies can be condemned as evil for not having aversions that people generally have many and strong reasons to create through acts of condemnation. Yet, it may still be the case that he has no reason not to lie. People generally have failed to give him such a reason.

Fortunately, I think there is a solution to this problem, and this solution involves distinguishing between two different sorts of "oughts": "ought" in the non-moral sense, and "ought" in the ethical sense. We are using the term non-morally when we say something like "If you want your car to have a long life, you ought to change the oil frequently." "Ought" is being used in the ethical sense when we say something along the lines of "I understand that, while murdering that person might benefit you, you ought not to kill him."

Desirism allows for something very similar to what you write here. "I understand that, while murdering that person may benefit you, people generally have many strong reasons to apply forms if punishment (such as condemnation) to the reward-learning system of others as a way of inhibiting the desires that would motivate such an action."

However - i suspect you are wanting to assert some sort of Kantian categorical imperative - an "ought" that does not have a goal. It's "just wrong" and that is all there is to it.

"Ought" in this categorical sense does not exist. There is no such thing as "just wrong". All 'just wrong' claims, no matter how popular, are false.

Desires are the only reasons for action that exist. They are the only kinds we find any actual evidence for - found in their ability to explain and predict intentional actions. Desires are propositional attitudes that can be expressed in the form "desire that P". The goal of a desire that P is a state of affairs in which P is true. All of our behavior is goal directed - including praise and condemnation. All of our motivation comes from our own desires.

Your definition captures the categorical nature of moral statements, but at the cost if making them mythical entities of no relevance or importance in the real world. My use sacrifices the categorical element of moral ought, but allows moral claims to remain true an important. They are all about malleable desires that people have many, strong, and real interests in promoting.

There is a precedent for this in chemistry. It was proposed that atoms were made up of parts. It could have been argued that thus claim violated the essential meaning of the word 'atom'. The word comes from ancient Greece and means literally, "without parts". Chemists faced a choice. They could have kept the essential meaning and insisted that a huge number of claims made in chemistry before that point were false. Or it could drop this essential meaning and allow chemistry tp progress much as it had.

Please note that this choice in no way threatened the objectivity of chemistry.

Ethics faces the same choice. It can preserve the categorical element of moral term and render all moral claims false. Or it can abandon that element and allow moral claims to remain potentially true and important.

I opt for the second option.

It should go without saying what we desire the most is justice.

Actually, this is false.

We evolved dispositions towards those desires that brought our ancestors biological success. Desires for sex, desires for food and drink, desires for the protection of our offspring, aversions to that which increase the possibility of injury and illness (e.g, the view down a steep cliff or the smell of rotting flesh).

Plus we have some malleable desires - modified by experience (particularly the social norms we pick up as children in cultures that have widely varying amounts of justice and injustice).

Regardless of what your personal concept if justice may be, we can falsify this claim just by pointing out the massive differences in what different communities call "justice". This alone should disprove any claim that there is a thing called "justice that we desire the most.

4 comments:

My response to the comments you made in your post will not necessarily be in the order in which they were written. I hope you don't mind.

Regardless of what your personal concept if justice may be, we can falsify this claim just by pointing out the massive differences in what different communities call "justice". This alone should disprove any claim that there is a thing called "justice["] that we desire the most.

The conventionalist argument you are making here refutes itself. A great number of cultures subordinate experimental science to divine revelation. Some have even rejected the validity of experimental science outright. Others still have rejected anything that conflicted with what Aristotle had said. But surely this does not entail that there is no truth, or that there are no legitimate sources of knowledge. The Conventionalist's claim that the multiplicity of understandings of what constitutes truth prevents us from having an objectively true understanding of truth, is self-defeating.

The varying conceptions of what are and are not legitimate sources of knowledge do not entail that there is no such thing as objective and universally knowable truth, nor do they entail that legitimate and illegitimate sources of knowledge cannot be distinguished from each other. Similarly, the existence of a large number of mutually exclusive understandings of what justice is does not give us any reason to believe that there is no such thing as a true understanding of justice. To argue otherwise requires one to assert that a large number of ideas regarding what X really is entails that no view of X is objectively correct, and such claims are self-defeating, given the existence of a multitude of understandings of what "truth" is.

Also, if we assume that experimental science is a legitimate source of knowledge, that holy books can be wrong, and that Aristotle authored at least one false statement, and that all cultures that claimed otherwise a) were objectively wrong, and b) should have known that they were wrong, then conventionalism must be rejected.

It does not follow from the fact that there are a large number mutually exclusive beliefs regarding what X is that none of these beliefs is true, or that none can be known to be correct, or even that genuine knowledge of X is not universally accessible.

[This post is nearing the 4,096-letter mark, so I will end the first part of my comment here.]

I said: "Ought" is being used in the ethical sense when we say something along the lines of "I understand that, while murdering that person might benefit you, you ought not to kill him."

You replied: Desirism allows for something very similar to what you write here. "I understand that, while murdering that person may benefit you, people generally have many strong reasons to apply forms [o]f punishment (such as condemnation) to the reward-learning system of others as a way of inhibiting the desires that would motivate such an action."

And what are these reasons? You would probably cite the fact that the desire we all have not to be killed is stronger than our desire to murder. According to the actual claim you made that I quoted above, when we tell that person not to commit murder, we are really just saying "I want there to be negative repercussions for committing murder so I myself or others that I care about do not find themselves murdered." This view is problematic for a number of reasons.

Let's take a slaveholder living in the middle of the 19th century in the Southern part of the United States as our example of someone who we would all claim "ought" to stop doing what he is doing. Given the slaveholder's penchant for owning slaves, and given our inability to stop him (he does, after all, occupy a completely different point in history), what do we mean when we say that he and others like him "ought" to have freed their slaves? Do we really only mean to say that slaves generally had strong reasons to condemn the fact that they were enslaved? Surely not.

In reality, there is a single state of affairs called "justice." We all know what justice truly is in spite of the large number of different conceptions of what constitutes justice, just as all rational agents know that scientific experiments yield truth, regardless of what their culture believes. Pardon the disgression, but here's the interesting part: even if the person claiming that no claims of the Koran and the Old Testament can be scientifically falsified consciously believes this, she still knows that her claim is false. That is, she is not justified in believing it. "People who believe what she believes should know better," we might say. This is because we recognize that the fact that science can be the source of genuine knowledge a) is a fact, b) can be universally known, and c) that, in an important sense, everyone already "knows" that it is a genuine source of knowledge, and that those who claim to believe otherwise are simply deceiving themselves.

Something similar is true with respect to our understanding of what justice is. Even if we consciously believe that justice consists of, say, slavery, we still "know" unconsciously that this is not true. This is similar to how we all ultimately know that scientific experiments can produce genuine knowledge, even if we hold conscious beliefs to the contrary.

Returning to the example of the slaveholder, it is still true that he "ought" to have freed his slaves, and that it was unreasonable for him not to. Had we been white people living in his time, we (hopefully!) still would have said that he "ought" to free them, and we would have said this because we desired liberty for his slaves as an end in itself - that is, because we desired justice. We would be able to accuse him of being unreasonable for refusing to do so because he too desires justice above all else, and he ultimately understands that slavery is unjust, even if he consciously holds the belief that there is nothing wrong with what he is doing.

If not for our authentic desire for justice, why would we care if he owned slaves? And if not for his own implicit understanding of justice according to which slavery is unjust, how could we attribute irrationality to his choice of owning slaves?

[I have reached my 4,096 character limit, so my argument will continue in the next comment.]

There are other reasons for action that can be explained solely in terms of a desire for justice. Take the following hypothetical:

A woman is the mother of two infants, none of whom she has ever officially accepted responsibility for or has had any opportunity to place up for adoption.

The first infant will die of dehydration if his mother does not breastfeed him.

The second infant will die of dehydration if his mother does not donate blood to him.

Suppose that donating blood and breastfeeding are, for this woman, equally painful and burdensome.

It should be obvious that, while just laws would compel the woman to breastfeed the infant who needed to be breastfed, they would not force her to donate blood. We have a reason for enacting laws that would compel breastfeeding, but at the same time we have reasons for passing laws that would allow the woman not to donate blood to her infant.

The only possible explanation for this discrepancy is that justice demands that she breastfeed her infant, but does not demand that she donate blood. Why else should we force her to breastfeed, but not force her to donate blood, if not for our desire for justice?

No desire but our desire for justice can account for why we would treat these two situations differently.

Austin Nedved > It should be obvious that, while just laws would compel the woman to breastfeed the infant who needed to be breastfed, they would not force her to donate blood.

Ironically, I think you disproved your own argument. You see, I do not think these two situations should be treated very differently. I was actually quite stunned that you think there is an obvious and significant difference. My partner sitting next to me on the couch agreed with my assessment as well (so I know of at least 2 people who disagree with you).

What can account for this difference in opinion regarding this innate sense of justice? Perhaps my partner and I are blind to this innate sense of justice we have within us? Or maybe not, and you are the one that is blind to it? Or… might the simpler explanation be that there is no innate sense of justice, such that when you ask one person what is "just" they will base their answer on their own beliefs and desires, which might very well differ from someone else's beliefs and desires.

(Note, though, that I do think one person can be objectively wrong about what they think should be the case. It's just that the criteria for them being right or wrong is based on the real-world facts of the matter, not on some proposed internal "sense of justice".)

About Me

When I was in high school, I decided that I wanted to leave the world better off than it would have been if I had not existed. This started a quest, through 12 years of college and on to today, to try to discover what a "better" world consists of. I have written a book describing that journey that you can find on my website. In this blog, I will keep track of the issues I have confronted since then.